04/24/2010

“And the hangovers hurt more than they used to....”

Those of you who know me know that I'm
well, a bit of an Elliott Smith fan (ahem) to say the least. He's my favorite songwriter. If I think about that too much I'll
start second guessing myself, but there's no one else whose music
I've listened to as intensely as his. He had a fantastic sense of
language (billions of little quotable lines) and a superlative sense
of melody and he wasn't lazy about neither of 'em.
That's clear enough from the number of different versions there are
floating around of songs like Miss Misery. He worked hard. He did a
lot of drugs, yes, but he worked hard and he listened very carefully to a lot of different things.

Heatmiser
was his first semi-famous band—kind of post punk rock and roll. That's what was
popular in those days, but apparently Elliott wasn't feeling it, which is
why he started his own side projects. These were categorized as "folk punk" and later "alternative." But when you
listen his stuff and when you read about his background, you realize that there's a whole lot more to the music than that. There's the Beatles component, yes (yawn, we always hear about that),
but there's also a little barber shop quartet by way of his
grandmother, some flamenco and a little country among many other things I'm sure. The guy was a musical sponge.

My own musical tastes are pretty eclectic. More
eclectic than I'd like to admit, perhaps. I don't think I'm alone in this by any means. It's easy to cop to your
high school affinity for bands like The Alarm, not so easy, perhaps,
to admit that you love the music from Godspell, because you used to
dance around to it in the living room wielding a dish towel like a
feather boa. But perhaps that's a story for another time. So, after all the aesthetic
debates are over, after we find our appropriate and useful marketing
categories, after we've
dismissed some of these as not suitable for consumption, we still (hopefully)
like what we like, in spite of ourselves. Kind of like we like Pringles, even
though they're over-processsed and bad for our hearts. But it's far less harmful to our systems to listen to the stuff that
we like that may not have received the critical stamp of approval. In
fact, it may even be good for you. Barriers are nothing but
bad for creativity. After all, without such diversions, we wouldn't
have this little gem....